rides. I didn’t want to go by myself, but I ended up on the swing ride that takes you round and round. I remember thinking as the ride made circles around itself that I wish I was free like the people I see here. Free to walk around and be me. But I wasn’t. The next time we went out was Halloween that same year 1999, we went to the Smith Farm and we all dressed up that year, me and Nancy were hippies, A was Belle from
One outing melted into the next. I learned to not look people in the eye. I felt if I did, they would ask me questions I couldn’t possibly answer. I stuck close to Nancy. I could feel my hands shaking when I reached out to touch something I wanted. In time going out became easier and we even brought the girls shopping with us. But I could never shake the feeling that one day someone would say, “Hey, aren’t you that missing girl?” but nobody ever did. I was nobody. Nobody saw me.
Cats
There is a stray cat in the backyard that Phillip feeds and she had a batch of kittens. He calls her “mama kitty.” She is going to live in the house with Phillip’s mother. He found homes for all the kittens except one who he is keeping tied up in the backyard. He named him Blackjack. He is very friendly. It’s nice having a kitty around again. I didn’t like how Phillip was treating him, though. When he would go on his “runs,” Blackjack could sometimes be heard crying at night. He is not fixed yet, so the crying is loud and gets on Phillip’s nerves. To shut him up, he tosses the contents of his urine bucket on poor Blackjack. I hate it and tell him to stop. When he’s high on drugs, he never listens to me. But I bring it up again when he’s coming off of the drugs and he says he feels bad about doing that to the cat and promises me he won’t use that method anymore. I tell him it would help to get him fixed, and Phillip says he will look into getting it done.
Blackjack lived a long life. Toward the end I took primary care of him and I was the one that found him when he died. It was very hard for me. At the time, I had made a cat enclosure which he would go in at night to keep safe, and that’s where I found him one morning. It was in 2002, he was all curled up dead and stiff. I cried a lot for him. I could tell his time was coming, though, because he was not himself for many days before that.
A few years later, when the girls were little, I used to go outside to be by myself. Sometimes I would feel a pressure build inside of me. The need to run away would feel so heavy that in order to soothe myself, I would sit by myself outside. Not where anyone could see me—just to a point where I felt I was away and by myself. One of my favorite spots was a woodpile that was on the other side of one of the many fences in the backyard. One day I noticed that a stray cat was going back there a lot, so I sat for a long time and watched and, sure enough, out popped three little kittens. I put wet food out for them, trying to lure them out. Only one turned out to be friendly and I asked Phillip if I could keep him and he said yes. The others he took to the local pound for adoption. The one I kept was a male, long hair, he looked like a Maine coon. I named him Tucker. I think he was the first cat that I really felt was mine. Although I loved Eclipse, I never really felt she was mine. I found Tucker myself. I fed him. I made sure he was safe, I loved him deeply. He was always so sweet and affectionate and came whenever I called. Well … sometimes. I remember one evening at dinnertime, I called and called and he didn’t come for the longest time. I usually let them out during part of the day and then I put them back inside their enclosure at night by feeding them. Well, that day I called and called and was becoming very scared that I would never see him again. When there he comes over the fence and starts meowing for dinner. I was so relieved. He lived in there with a stray cat that we caught in one of those humane cat traps. We kept seeing this black stray cat around the yard and he was eating all the birds, so we decided we needed to do something. We caught him and got him fixed and I decided to keep him, too. I named him Lucky. He turned out to be a very nice cat, too. Very good personality, loved to eat! He lived with Tucker for many, many years. They were like brothers. The day they died broke my heart. To this day, even writing this right now I feel the tears coming.
It all started the day before Halloween. I was in the office, working, when G came running in saying there were two big dogs in our backyard. I became concerned for the kids first of all and ran outside to see them for myself. As soon as I got out there, two big huskies went running back from where they had come from, which happened to be through a hole they had chewed from our neighbors’ yard to ours through two fences. I put up a piece of wood and thought that would take care of the problem; looking back, I wish so much I would have taken the time to do a better job of securing that fence, but hindsight is 20-20.
The next day, about midmorning, I was working in the office again, when in came the kids again saying the dogs were back. This time I wasn’t as panicky. They seemed harmless to me, and I was sure as soon as I went outside they would go back over the fence. So Phillip, Nancy, the girls, and I went out to the back and shooed them back over and were getting ready to make the hole more secure so it wouldn’t happen again. Everyone was out there helping me get the dogs back over and then I turned around and went to say “Hi” to my cats, Tucker and Lucky, but they didn’t move because they were dead. I felt such devastation I don’t think I moved for a long time. Phillip saw me, then looked at them and saw the huge hole the dogs had made in the enclosure which they were in. The kids were out there, too, and hadn’t seen them yet or even realized what had happened, they just saw me sobbing and on my knees. I just couldn’t help it. I was so devastated. Phillip stayed with me while Nancy took the girls inside, I’m not sure what she told them, but I stayed outside sobbing. Phillip went over to the neighbors to let them know what happened, and I soon heard them working on the fence. Surely, they could hear me cry, too; but I just wanted them to fix the fence so it didn’t happen again to any of our other cats. I cried all day that day and several days thereafter, especially during feeding time when I didn’t have to make as many dishes as I used to; those times were especially hard and sometimes I would have A finish. I stayed in bed a lot and slept; the first night I cried so hard during the day that I got a killer sinus headache that night and wasn’t able to sleep well. It took time to get over the loss of them, especially Tucker, who I will remember forever because I found him and he loved me.
In 2006, Nancy and I brought home two kittens on one of our thrift store outings for the girls. They were being given away in a box outside of the supermarket. We picked two out and brought them home. The girls named them Princess and Misty. Princess attached herself to my youngest daughter and would follow her around like a puppy. Misty was more of the laid-back type and spent many hours in my eldest daughter’s lap.
We also had two dogs that used to belong to our neighbor who had months earlier fallen in his house and was moved to an elderly care facility. Phillip brought his two dogs—Mindy, a pit bull/Labrador mix and Rowdy, a German shepherd/rottweiler ball of puppy energy. We soon learned that the two dogs loved to chase cats, and since we had so many on the property, we decided to build a dog run for them. I would take them out once a day for a walk on the leash around the backyard. Rowdy would always pull, so I didn’t think anything of it when he suddenly yanked so hard on the leash and tried to pull me toward the old barn that was in the middle of the property. It was half falling down and I warned the girls multiple times to stay away from it. Rowdy was adamant about sniffing around the barn, so I gave in and let him lead me over. There was a small cutout looking into the barn and he immediately jumped up, peered inside, and started whining. I pulled him away and looked in myself and didn’t see anything at first because it was so dark in there. I finally saw some movement and discovered it was a
